Designing an Innovative Digital Group Work Assignment to Foster Employability: An Adaptable Hybrid Approach for the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

A strategic priority for university educators is to ensure graduates have developed a range of transferable skills. An important skill required by employers is the development of digital capabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the move of courses into blended formats which provided an opportunity for educators to redesign their modules to embed digital skills. During this challenging context, the Biological Sciences Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, in collaboration with the E-Learning and Careers Teams, capitalised on existing Microsoft technologies to launch an innovative online group project for a first-year module. This collaborative approach to curriculum design increased capacity to pivot quickly, and readily support students, as well as ensuring that learnings from the design process could be widely disseminated. The virtual collaborative assessment had high engagement and supported the development of transferable skills such as teamwork, digital literacy, and communication. The incorporation of a guided self-reflective exercise into the assessment allowed students to evidence the transferable skills they had acquired. By frontloading these foundational skills into an assessment early in their education, we increased capacity to build on these skills in future years across the wider programme. The design, which used asynchronous online technologies, also increased the capacity of staff to fit marking and student queries around their schedules. Our findings demonstrated that through online group work and guided self-reflective assessment, students developed transferable skills that would benefit them in their future careers. This transformative approach could be utilised across other departments, both in remote and hybrid environments.